memory allocation

[geofflambert]

It's been years since I had to go through installation and fix bugs. I seem to recall that the default amount of memory allocated to this game is not nearly enough. AW1Steve is trying to use his laptop to play the game and he's having some trouble. Am I correct that there might be an adjustment needed to his installation?

[Zorch]

What OS is he using, such as Windows 10 Home?

[BBfanboy]

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

It's been years since I had to go through installation and fix bugs. I seem to recall that the default amount of memory allocated to this game is not nearly enough. AW1Steve is trying to use his laptop to play the game and he's having some trouble. Am I correct that there might be an adjustment needed to his installation?

Minimum installation requirements given for programs are inevitably relying on disk/RAM swapping to operate at all - that is why there is always a free space minimum in the specs too (part for the program, part for the swapping elbow room). Swapping requires time so the program will indeed run slowly. I always try to have 2 or 3 times the minimum when I decide whether to buy a program.

[Alfred]

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

It's been years since I had to go through installation and fix bugs. I seem to recall that the default amount of memory allocated to this game is not nearly enough. AW1Steve is trying to use his laptop to play the game and he's having some trouble. Am I correct that there might be an adjustment needed to his installation?

Not really.

4GB of RAM should be enough. Less RAM will probably be OK too.

At one stage during AE development the RAM requirement had reached 1GB but this was pared back to about 400MB by release time. This paring was accomplished by unlading from memory less critical data (such as ship images and messages) and only loading them into memory as required. What has to remain in memory continuously during turn resolution are art files such as the map, and the database. Doing all this meant upon release AE could run well with only 2GB of RAM, and run albeit somewhat slowly, with only 1 GB of RAM. All this at a time when few systems had more than 1 GB of RAM. Today there would be few computers equipped with much less than 4GB.

To the amount used by AE you need to add whatever the OS needs too. Running other programs in the background will also use up capacity.

Alfred

[Trugrit]

Alfred is correct on memory.

Also, for most users CPU 2 should be more than good to use as well on a modern machine.

Even though there can be 50 or more processes running in the background they use memory instead of CPU.
Virus programs only use about 0.1 percent of CPU unless they are running a scan.

Windows 10 will let you watch the CPU and memory usage of the programs (Apps) running.

Set it up like this.

Run the game in a window and right click on the bottom task bar and then click on task manager.
Then set the game window and the Task Manager window side by side. Tab the Task Manager
to Processes and as the game runs you can watch the performance.

The below screen shot is the Guadalcanal scenario running during a turn resolution.
You can see it only uses about 500 MB but I have some additional art running.

The problem is Windows 10 uses a lot of memory.

[geofflambert]

Thanks Alfred.

[RangerJoe]

I have found that Microsoft Edge, while it uses a lot less memory than Firefox, really slows things down a lot more. Maybe because it gets first priority on a Windows 10 machine.

You might want to consider "Process Explorer" or "Process Hacker."

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysint ... s-explorer

https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/

[Korvar]

If the RAM size is fine, another thing to try is to check the Virtual Memory settings. Even when enough RAM is available, sometimes older programs can insist on using virtual memory (i.e. the computer pretends part of your hard drive is extra RAM).

To check your virtual memory settings in Win10:

Press the Windows key + Pause/Break >> Click on "Advanced System Settings" on the left >> Click the "Advanced" tab >> Click the "Settings" button under "Performance" >> Click the "Advanced" tab >> Click the "Change" button

Check that the "Currently allocated" value at the bottom is equal to or greater than the "Recommended" value. I generally set it to half of the physical RAM on the computer, unless the primary drive is short on disk space. The "Automatically mananage" setting is turned on by default and usually works well, but sometimes it is accidentally turned off. So it is worth checking.


Besides that, it's also possible that the hard drive needs defragged. This is not necessary if the drive is an SSD, however. Power Defragmenter is an old but good defragmenter that utilizes a Microsoft utility to do the defrag.

[rustysi]

AW1Steve is trying to use his laptop

Some laptops cheat when it comes to memory. They tell you they have 'x' memory for the machine which they do. Then they tell you how much memory they have for the video card, which they don't. Some or all of the vid card mem may come from the sys mem leaving you short. Just something I remembered last night.

[rustysi]

Oh, and another thing. On my old laptop WitP vanilla brought it to its knees. I had to manually turn off some of the background programs that were not needed for Windows to run. This got WitP to operate acceptably.

[rustysi]

Am I correct that there might be an adjustment needed to his installation?

No. The adjustments would need to be made to the machine.